LogFAQs > #937113197

But our actual main villain, Veld, oh my god. Do you like villains that make an impact on the plot? Well, this guy shows up twice and his intro, while meant to make you care about what he does to a likable character, just ends up feeling like a joke when you realize he did that in response to Leif and company being nearby instead of just doing it to them. Do you like villains with deep characterization? Well, Veld has no backstory, his agenda is that he works for Manfroy and his personality can be summed up as "is the bad guy". Do you like villains who shit on the established story? Probably not, but if you do you might like this guy! To make Veld seem credible they have he and Manfroy try to give him credit for the actions of another character in Genealogy, as if the writers realized the final battle was about to happen against a guy no one gave a fuck about and they needed to find a cheap way to prop him up. Trying to give Veld credit for Travant's ambush of Quan is absurd bullshit. Acting like he was needed to pass information along for the attack to work is ridiculous, in Genealogy Quan already said he expected Travant to use his absence from home as an excuse to attack, he just expected the attack would be directed at Lenster rather than at himself. And really, how would you *not* know half the army of your fiercest rival was on the move?

Veld, I like you more when you were Gharnef. And I liked Gharnef more when he was Validar. And I liked Validar more when he was Manfroy. And I didn't even care that much for Manfroy! Imagine being the main villain of a game and being nothing more than a fourth rate knockoff of a mediocre character from your own story. And yes I know the timing doesn't work out for that Gharnef/Validar comparison, deal with it.

On a final note, Thracia at least manages to be alright aesthetically. The Jugdral art style has never been my favourite but this game does at least reign in some of the utterly absurd haircuts Genealogy brought to the table. The soundtrack is not one of my favourites in the series by any means but it's still decent, with the track from most fog of war maps being a standout (that got an even better remix in New Mystery). And I'll always love the Jugdral combat animations the most of any game in the series, even though I play with animations off 99% of the time. So hey, at least it looks and sounds fine. Got to find something to enjoy here and there, right?

Thracia 776 had a very rushed development cycle, and it shows. A lot of its ideas could have been good with a bit more polish, but the end product that we got is just a disaster on a lot of levels. A map like chapter 14 could be a classic with a few tweaks, but instead ends up being a huge disappointment once you realize how trivial it truly is. The game doing a better job of communicating its core mechanics to the player would likewise go a long way. Thracia ends up in this weird place where it gets a reputation for being very hard, but it's actually mostly very easy IF you know what you're getting into. It almost feels like it was intended to make people feel good about themselves for beating the "hard" game but without being hard enough that anyone would struggle if they looked some stuff up, but that's probably just a conspiracy theory. Some interesting ideas exist here, but in the end ideas don't matter if you can't figure out how to make them work.

And that marks the end of this...rather lengthy write up. I don't think most entries will be this long, but I never quite know how much I'll have to say until I start.

Up next: Yes I'm still doing this "up next" thing even though process of elimination will eventually make it pretty meaningless. Ahem. Up next, a game whose placement near the bottom of a list is far less controversial.

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Meow!